Lee A. Daniels
Director of Publications
National Urban League
(Guest Columnist)
I had the good fortune to be introduced to Mr. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, of Hannibal, Missouri, recently, and it made me realize I've got to study more of my American culture.
Of course, Samuel Langhorne Clemens is better known as Mark Twain; and, of course, I wasn't introduced to him in person, since he grew up in Hannibal in the decades just before the Civil War and died in April 1910 in New York City. At his death, he was certainly, with the exception of Teddy Roosevelt, the most famous and recognizable and American American of his time.
And, of course, I already knew who Mark Twain was from my early adolescence. But now I've watched the riveting and lyrical documentary of Twain's life by Ken Burns on PBS earlier this year; and I even more recently saw a play based on Twain's 1894 novel, Pudd' nhead Wilson, that opened in New York on May 15. at the Lucille Lortel Theater, in Greenwich Village.
The play is being staged by The Acting Company, a New York-based touring repertory theater company that criss-crosses the nation each year to bring plays, both classical and modern, to communities large and small.
Adapted for the stage and re-interpreted somewhat by the playwright Charles Smith, the play, like the novel, is a powerful exploration of the meaning of race and color, difference and sameness in the human experience as seen through the American Experience.
Twain,"this avatar of American literature,"as Burns and others have said of his importance,"proved for the first time that art could be created out of the American language,"write Geoffrey C. Ward and Dayton Duncan in the companion book to the PBS series,"and laid bare the contradictions at the heart of American life-slavery and racism."
Those insights are illuminated with both broad and subtle humor as well as casual and deliberate cruelty in Smith's adaptation.
The story turns on one of the central facts of Slavery-that it was very often a distorted family affair: white fathers, who were the plantation owners; mothers, who could be black, and thus, a slave, or white; mistresses; half-brothers and sisters, and cousins, all related in some fashion to the plantation owner.
In Pudd' nhead Wilson, set in a small, thriving Missouri town in the decades just before the Civil War-the decades when Twain himself was a boy in Missouri-the play is driven by a single act at its beginning by the plantation owner's slave mistress.
She, named Roxy, gave birth to a boy, Valet de Chambers, or Chambers, for short, at the very same time that the plantation owner's wife, gave birth to the heir to the plantation, Thomas à Becket Driscoll, or Tom. The wife died in childbirth, and, the rules of Slavery being what they were, it became Roxy's duty to be “mammy” to them both.
But the rules required that she favor the “white” boy-her son's half-brother-over her own flesh and blood.
However, the boys are physically indistinguishable from each other, as Pudd'nhead who is a Northern-born white lawyer, recently come to live in the town, remarks. They have the same complexion, the same features. They are, after all, brothers.
No one, not even the plantation owner, can tell them apart. Only Roxy knows who is really Chambers and who is really Tom.
And so, one evening, when she realizes that the plantation owner will treat their son, Chambers, as just another slave, she switches the clothing of the two baby boys. From then on, until the very end of the play, Chambers is Tom, heir to the plantation, and Tom is Chambers, the slave.
The wonderful casting of Pudd' nhead Wilson “complicates” this racial switching and the perception of both the play's black and white characters as to who is “white” and who is a “nigger.”
Yes, that word is used plenty in the play, as it was in real life; and, albeit current ivy-encrusted rationalizations, the dehumanizing cruelty behind its use-then and now-is fully evident.
One of Twain's, and playwright Smith's, sharpest insights, is not that human beings are all the same. That's a facile assertion, as blind to reality as all the rationalizations once used to justify Slavery and segregation.
It is that human nature is the same. That is, that all human beings have the capacity, depending on their circumstances and the opportunity they are given or deprived of, to do anything, to be anything, regardless of their race, color, or national origin.
That truth, as the play makes clear in ways that are ultimately wrenching, applies to human beings' capacity for evil as well as good.
Mark Twain, a white Southerner who briefly enlisted in the Confederate Army, saw that truth with a piercing clarity in the 19th century, as playwright Charles Smith sees it today.
Pudd' nhead Wilson's truth is all the more powerful and arresting as we now look across the globe at our seemingly innumerable conflicts rooted in racial, ethnic and religious differences.
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